Writing expressions for the wheels

Once you have the car parented and moving as a static object, you can think about…the expressions for the wheels. We want to use an expression for the…wheels that makes them roll on the road as we pull the master control forward.…What I need to do is solve for some kind of rotation for one forward unit of…movement on my Master Control. When I pull on the x axis, those wheels…should spin automatically. When I had made my original Nurbcircles…for the wheel, I had made one and not deleted the history and then cloned it around.…

The clones don't have a radius, but in the original control front left, the first one…I made. The makeNurbCircle1 tab has that radius,…13.165 inches. What I'm going to do then is use the…circumference of the wheel to figure out what one increment of rotation is per…forward unit movement of the car. Here's how this looks.…I've switched calculator over to a scientific view, just because there's a pi…button there. We can go under View and Scientific to…pull that up. Now I'll get the circumference.…

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Author

Released

7/22/2013

Learn to rig a car model in Autodesk Maya for use in animation, games, design visualization, and visual effects. Author Adam Crespi starts with an overview of parenting and hierarchy, moving into separating the model into working components. From there, you'll learn about creating controllers, constructing functioning wheel assemblies, and constraining the suspension. Expressions are used to tie the rig components together and add a degree of autonomous motion and rotation. Last, a bonus chapter on materials shows how to add realistic shaders onto the car and tie the controls to functionality such as operable headlights and taillights.

Note: Some experience with polygonal modeling in Maya and beginning knowledge of rigging and constraints will help you get the most from this course.